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Buy or build? Focus on the core product or innovate? Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott's advice for scaling

The Review by First Round

Today’s episode is with Adrian McDermott, CTO of Zendesk. Adrian started at the company back in 2010, when they were only 50 employees. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson Today’s episode is with Adrian McDermott, CTO of Zendesk.

CTO 52
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Woven CEO Tim Campos on how to spend your most important asset

Intercom, Inc.

Tim has spent his entire professional career focusing on productivity, from Sybase to TLA-Tencor to Facebook where, over his six-year tenure (2010 – 2016), the amount of revenue per employee doubled to $1.8 Tim: I was hired in 2010, when Facebook was what I like to call a “teenage company”. million apiece.

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Who is Lenny Rachitsky: Background, Newsletter, Podcast, and More

Userpilot

Renowned for his tenure on Airbnb’s product team, Lenny’s professional journey truly began in 2010 when he served as the CEO of a budding startup named “Localmind.” Before starting his own venture, Lenny worked in the product and engineering teams of companies like Airbnb and Neustar.

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BoS Conf Online.Spring Speaker – Scott Berkun

Business of Software Conference

Windows, MSN and later led an engineering team at WordPress.com (2010-2012) responsible for Jetpack, Publicize and other features used by millions of people. . Born and raised in Queens, NYC, he studied philosophy, computer science and design at CMU. His first career focused on UX Design. At Microsoft he worked on Internet Explorer 1.0

CTO 52
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2021 in conversation: Learnings from the podcast

Intercom, Inc.

Will Larson , CTO of Calm. Des Traynor , Co-founder and CTO of Intercom. Liam Geraghty: Will Larson is the CTO of Calm , the mindfulness app. The first time I ever walked into the Facebook office, the HQ in Palo Alto circa 2010, I was driving from the Google offices into the Facebook offices, and holy s**t, the difference.

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My top essays/tweetstorms in 2019 on product/market fit, investing, KPIs, YouTubers, and more

Andrew Chen

For everyone who joined in the early years – 2010 to 2014 – they’ve already hit their 4 year mark and many are spinning out. My good friend @drewjgray joined as CTO of the autonomous startup @voyage with @olivercameron. The really early folks are investing. The ATG / Otto folks are making moves as well.

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Solve a Hard Problem (Tinder). Chapter 8 of my upcoming book, The Cold Start Problem

Andrew Chen

Jahan Khanna, cofounder/CTO of Sidecar spoke of its origin: It was obvious that letting anyone sign up to a driver would be a big deal. The company had operated for several years, starting in 2010 — several years before Uber X — and provided the template for what would become a $100 biillion+ gross revenue industry.